Chapter 3. Processes

Contributions from Denis Sheahan

Monitoring process activity is a routine task during the administration of systems. Fortunately, a large number of tools examine process details, most of which make use of procfs. Many of these tools are suitable for troubleshooting application problems and for analyzing performance.

Tools for Process Analysis

Since there are so many tools for process analysis, it can be helpful to group them into general categories.

  • Overall status tools. The prstat command immediately provides a by-process indication of CPU and memory consumption. prstat can also fetch microstate accounting details and by-thread details. The original command for listing process status is ps, the output of which can be customized. ...

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